In the future, networked lighting systems will evolve particularly due to new developments on lighting sources such as LED (Light Emitting Diode) luminaries leading to a higher number of light sources. Networked lighting systems with a high number of light sources or luminaries are also referred to as large scale networked lighting systems.
In conventional networked lighting systems, control is performed by using commands, which are transmitted over the communication medium of the lighting systems to set, for example, the light levels of the luminaires. These commands can be unicasted, addressing one luminaire, to set the light level of this luminaire to a specified value. Alternatively, such commands can be multicasted, addressing several luminaries, for example groupcasted or broadcasted, addressing a group of luminaires or the entire network, i.e. all luminaries of a lighting system. However, all these approaches require transmitting the individual light settings of each luminaire, and thus, they require high bandwidth and limit the efficiency and flexibility of the final system.